1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of creating network services.
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2. Background Art
The World Wide Web is a collection of web sites that each provide information, data, and/or services of one kind or another. A problem with current Internet and Web services is that each service must be programmed statically and independently from other services. Further, to modify or change a capability of the web service, a programmer must modify the web service's code. This problem can be better understood by reviewing business and their use of the internet.
A large number of businesses rely on other businesses as part of their functionality. For example, a distributor of products relies on all of the different manufacturers of the products to reliably supply not only the products themselves, but information about the price and availability of the products. Manufacturers themselves also rely on parts suppliers to build complete products. To compete in a competitive business environment, it is necessary for companies to be able to provide rapid responses to customers about products and services. This often requires interaction with many other companies. In the past, a customer might have been willing to wait while a company representative made phone calls or referenced catalogs to provide answers to customer requests. But today, customers demand faster service, or the ability to obtain information themselves. In other cases, customers may not be interacting with a company representative at all, but with a company web site. In that environment, the customer requires even more rapid and efficient service.
One way for companies to stay competitive in today's business environment is to develop application programs (software) that allows them to interact with third party company computer systems to obtain information and services that are needed to operate the companies business. Traditionally, however, it has been difficult to create these applications. One problem is the difficulty in interfacing with the often proprietary computer systems of different companies. Another problem is the difficulty in writing and debugging the applications themselves, as well as updating them when conditions change or when third party companies change or update their own systems.
This change in business climate has also been driven in part by the internet. The internet has made information from multiple sources easily available to individuals. In addition, the internet has changed the way companies interact with each other. Business to Business interaction is now often accomplished via the internet. Often the relationship between businesses (such as between a distributor and its suppliers) is called a “channel relationship”, or a “business channel”.
Creating software applications to manage business channels is complex and inflexible using traditional techniques. If a hard coded application is created, it may not be able to respond to new channels that are created or modified over time. Repeated recoding efforts may be required. In other cases, a company may be in a channel relationship with another company without the other company realizing it. For example, companies that use Federal Express or other shippers to transport goods do so without explicit formal relationships with the shipper. For the shipper, maintaining business channels with every company that uses it is a daunting, if not impossible task.
Traditional techniques focus on efficiency in the design of an application in the re-use of code, through object oriented programming for example, but do not provide efficiency or customizability at runtime of an application. With millions of companies making services available on the internet, there is a need to be able to efficiently create custom applications that dynamically invoke and interconnect a combination of web services, and configure themselves in customized formats at runtime. To date, the prior art has not provided effective solutions.
Currently the web is used to provide predefined web pages for viewing by a user/client. But there is a need to do more than provide static web pages. It is desirable to easily create a mechanism/module that will modify or create a web page dynamically while taking into consideration the other elements or components of the web page. Further, there is a growing need to utilize web services that provide users with a variety of capabilities. There are currently no mechanisms for dynamically generating or modifying a web service. Additionally, there is no mechanism to modify a web service based on existing aspects of the web service.